Amazon Explains The Tech of the Kindle Paperwhite (Video)

Amazon’s new Kindle Paperwhite will begin shipping next week, but before readers can get their hands on the device Amazon wants to explain the technology behind the new eReader.

Today Amazon posted a YouTube video featuring some of the people who helped make the Kindle Paperwhite possible. A large part of the video involves the engineers talking about how the Kindle Paperwhite is the Kindle Amazon always wanted to make, that in a way they’ve worked on it for eight years.

Some time in the video is also spent talking about how Amazon wanted to keep the long battery life of the Kindle and keeping it the same basic form factor.

The big changes mentioned in the video, however, are the new screen and its front light. The screen in the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite has a higher resolution than any Kindle before it. That lets the team work with typography experts to put more fonts on the screen with a higher level of detail. It should mean that smaller fonts are easier to read and any images in books will look better on the new screen.

The front light on the Kindle Paperwhite is arguably the most important feature of the device. This video describes how the Kindle engineers managed to project light onto the screen evenly with what is basically a flattened optical fiber. Amazon uses that sheet of optical fiber to capture light from LEDs, only letting it through to the screen at specific points.